Key to workplace is collaboration

Iain Ross, Fair Work Australia’s new president, wants the tribunal to be more proactive in helping deal with economic challenges such as low productivity.
Phot: Josh Robenstone

by
Mark Skulley

The new president of Fair Work Australia has an impressive CV, but perhaps his most intriguing career move was a stint on secondment in the early 1990s with former treasurer Paul Keating.

Iain Ross was then a youthful ACTU officer and his boss, Bill Kelty, had more political clout than most cabinet ministers through the union movement having the Accord with the Hawke Labor government.

It was a pivotal time with an impressive cast of characters. Ross recalls that his fellow adviser on micro-economic reform was the young Ken Henry, a future Treasurer secretary. Keating’s chief-of-staff was Don Russell, who would later be Australian Ambassador in Washington. Future media executive Tom Mockridge was dealing with the parliamentary press gallery.

The secondment came as Keating and company were working on the shift from centralised wage fixing to enterprise bargaining. “It was partly relationship building, says Ross in an interview with the Weekend Financial Review. “It gave me an opportunity to work with Treasury over the budget cycle, which was a great experience . . . it gives you a bit more of an insight into the complexity of government."

It is an experience that is unusual, perhaps unique, among the 13 men and one woman who have headed Australia’s workplace tribunal since it was created in 1904. It is also a pointer to how Ross played an important backroom role in crucial economic and social changes over the past two decades.

These roles were recognised by Workplace Relations Minister
Bill Shorten
at a welcoming ceremony for Ross in Melbourne on Friday. Indeed, Shorten says that Ross has been “integral" in two of the most important changes since the Harvester judgment – Labor’s 1993 changes to workplace law and the creation of the superannuation guarantee levy, which the Gillard government has just increased from 9 per cent to 12 per cent.

“I can personally attest that you are a very good negotiator, an import skills in industrial relations," says Shorten, himself a former union leader.

“You work through an argument, you work continuously, once involved you become a lynch pin.

Related Quotes

Company Profile

“From working with you, in our previous lives, I know you are capable of bringing parties together to reach agreement, or at least an understanding, to deliver good outcomes for employers and employees."

After Ross left the ACTU, he was a vice-president of the former Australian Industrial Relations Commission for 12 years, where he worked on the rollout of enterprise bargaining and the hot spots such as the Tribunal panels dealing with areas such as construction and maritime industries.

When Shorten was at the Australian Workers Union, he negotiated the agreement on Ross’ turf – Melbourne’s multi-billion dollar Eastlink tollway project. On the employer side was Tony Shepherd who is now president of the Business Council of Australia, while Ross headed the AIRC’s construction industry panel.

“That project was completed six months ahead of schedule, hundreds of thousands of dollars under budget, with very little time lost and, most importantly, no one was killed during construction," Shorten says.

Shepherd appears to believe that the workplace arrangements on the Eastlink project went reasonably well. The BCA this month congratulated Shorten on the appointment of Ross, saying that he “commands respect among all those who know the industrial relations field in Australia well".

But in 2005, then Liberal Workplace Relations Minister Kevin Andrews wrote to the then head of the AIRC to raise concerns about the role of commission members working on the panel covering the turbulent construction industry, including Ross.

For his part, Ross told the welcoming ceremony that he had asked Bill Kelty about his role when he joined the ACTU as an ACTU as an industrial officer. “Bill said I could do anything I wanted to do as long as I didn’t make any mistakes."

Ross says that he has made mistakes, but with Kelty’s support, none of them had “proved fatal". Referring to the stint in Keating’s office, he professed little experience in micro-economic reform but was lucky that his colleague Ken Henry, “proved to know quite a lot".

In reality, Ross has a degree in economics as well as master of business administration. He also has a bachelor of law, master’s of law and doctorate (on unfair dismissal).

It’s worth noting that his PhD was supervised by workplace legal expert Ron McCallum, who now sits on the panel reviewing the Fair Work Act (and also taught the young Peter Costello).

As shown by his handling of the Eastlink project, Ross is not only relying on black letter law.

The time lost through strikes is rising, but Ross argues that disputation is cyclical and will rise during bargaining rounds in areas such as construction, manufacturing and coal mining.

“I’m always a bit wary about attaching too much significance to whatever the legislative framework might be," he says. “With strikes, you’re only measuring one feature of workplace conflict.

“What you don’t measure in terms of conflict are issues like turnover and low productivity, absenteeism.

“Whatever the legislative framework is, the key is still having a collaborative environment at the workplace level. It’s still dealing with trust, mutual respect, those sorts of issues.

Ross says that others will make their own judgments about his tenure at Fair Work Australia, but its members sought to “act in the public interest and within the scope of whatever the legislation [of the day] is".

He wants the tribunal to be more proactive in helping deal with economic challenges like low productivity and how the strong Australian dollar is looking. But he believes that the “key to successfully addressing" Australia’s productivity issues will be found at the industry and workplace level rather than in public policy.

He argues that the tribunal broadly operates with the consent of the parties and will be “helping when we can".